by Madeleine Davies, Church Times
Research identifies ‘warm but passive’ attachment of general public
BOTH the Church’s funding bodies and the Government should ramp up investment in cathedrals, where financial pressures are resulting in commercial bookings that risk “crowding out the sense of stillness and calm”, a new report has concluded.
Living Stones: English cathedrals as sacred spaces in changing times celebrated the contribution made by the country’s cathedrals, but warned that they are in “serious difficulty”, with 80 per cent in structural deficit.
“The pressures of financial survival can consume so much energy and attention that there is little left for the deeper questions of purpose and mission,” it said.
Produced by Theos, the report was funded by the Church Commissioners’ Cathedral Sustainability Fund and the Association of English Cathedrals (AEC). It will be presented to the National Cathedrals Conference in Bristol this week.
In addition to fieldwork at six cathedrals, where a visitor survey gathered 1375 responses, Theos commissioned a YouGov poll of 1802 members of the public. Although 77 per cent of the poll’s respondents had visited a cathedral in the past three years, the report cautioned that “we are at risk of overestimating how emotionally, culturally or financially invested English people are in their cathedrals”.
The report diagnosed in the public at large a “warm but passive dominant posture”. It continued: “While the non-religious population unfamiliar with church can present an opportunity for cathedrals, this group’s relative lack of spiritual formation also means it tends towards a default indifference, which requires deliberate effort to overcome.”
The report said that many respondents were “pleased that cathedrals exist, glad to benefit from them and even emotionally attached to them, but they do not automatically infer from this that they bear any responsibility for sustaining them”.
More than half (57 per cent) of the YouGov respondents said that they were unlikely to donate to their nearest cathedral if it was in financial difficulty. Overcoming such public ambivalence required work in schools, community life, and the wider public conversation, the report said.